In the IT industry people are often using beautiful compound terms or at least let readers wonder what all these exotics words mean. This time we are talking about LTFS, the LTO 5 tape and data storage with LTFS and in tape storage.

What is LTFS?

Linear Tape File System, LTFS, is a storage method at the tape media. Tape storage is used frequently by companies and large organisations (Enterprise). Especially in the healthcare sector storing medical information (photo files, MRI data and other patient data) is still very much appealed to the solid tape storage platform. The same applies to the banking sector where a long rest on the written data retention last by law and to keep the data "online" shows an unnecessary and expensive activity . Until recently there was one but. Information that has been written was "somewhere" on the tape and was therefore not specifically to retrieve data in a swift way. That changed with the advent of LTFS. From LTO 5 (1.5 Terabyte capacity) it is possible with the use of LTFS to locate specific data information quickly and adequate written on a LTO 5 or 6 the latest LTO tape.

LTFS works like USB stick

Like NTFS and FAT32, LTFS is an operating system that directly has access to stored files and a faster direct view at this file management becomes very much possible. This stored data can be read just as easily as if you are working with a USB stick, where the user can get easy excess to his data or as he likes to read the information back from tape and restore to the used back-up system. Previous generation tapes couldn`t do this because the entire tape had to be read. Certainly when organizations have many terabytes of data stored on the tapes and when inserting a cartridge, users still do not know which files are on the tape. During a recovery process time is the ever missing factor and the tight schedule a hospital (patient information) has leaves no room for unstructured searches. LTFS yielded 90% time savings on and saved a huge amount of energy, of man and machine.

Safe and cost effective!

Investigations in several departments at several companies show that organizations approximately 95 percent of the data created after 6 months is no longer used or appeal data. For these organizations the relatively inexpensive LTFS is not only useful from the compliance point of view , but also because of the costs related elements regarding storage on hard drives and SSD`s would be the outcome. Worldwide organizations started applying LTFS for the storage of video archives, CAD/CAM files, (medical) photo material such as MRI and other unstructured data where the readout of the directory makes all the difference. The tape drive will be detected in the storage system and approaches as a virtual drive. The use of a virtual drive is a concrete imitation of a physical hardware environment. Virtual means concrete imitation of a physical environment on a computer or storage environment.

LTFS at Ultrium LTO 5 and LTO 6

LTFS was first presented at the (NAB) trade show in April 12, 2010 in conjunction with the IBM LTFS product presentation. The LTFS technology was first implemented by IBM as a prototype running on Linux and Mac OS X platform somewhere in 2008/2009. LTFS is currently available on all ultrium LTO and ultrium LTO 5 and 6 media and was already known to all enterprise tape drives from (SUN Oracle) Storagetek and IBM.

LTFS will also be available in the near future tape drive and media, used in probably an even smarter variation.

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